Free Eviction Defense Lawyers Don’t Prevent Homelessness

A right to counsel for tenants can delay evictions—but it also raises rents.

Courtesy Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Image

The claim “prevention is the best medicine” is asserted in nearly every social policy debate, from foster care and mental illness to incarceration. Why not go “upstream,” to avoid the traumas and high costs associated with trying to “cure” such ills after they develop?

But prevention-style policy solutions are susceptible to at least two standard criticisms. First, they’re too broad, providing untargeted benefits to people who would have avoided the ill in question without help. Second, they can produce unintended—and sometimes counterproductive—consequences. That latter criticism is taken up by a new paper by Notre Dame economist Robert Collinson and his co-authors evaluating right-to-counsel policies.

Right-to-counsel policies provide tenants facing eviction with a free lawyer to fight landlords in court. Such policies exist in at least five states and 17 cities. They are often pitched as a form of homelessness prevention. Cleaning up encampments and shelters are expensive undertakings. So perhaps lawyering up the unstably housed could be preferable. Previous research found that right to counsel lengthened “case duration”—keeping tenants housed as court proceedings drag out—and increased tenants’ chances at winning their case against landlords.

Collinson and his coauthors redirect policymakers’ attention from the narrow, if important, question of whether free lawyers keep eviction-facing tenants housed temporarily to the broader question of how landlords and the housing market respond when right to counsel is implemented at scale. The researchers find that New York City’s “Universal Access to Counsel” program increased neighborhood rents.

The city phased in the policy gradually, on a zip code basis, from 2017 to 2022, creating a research opportunity to compare housing prices in adjacent neighborhoods with and without it. The researchers estimate that the program raised rents enough to offset the benefits tenants received from greater legal protection. On net, they conclude, the policy produced a moderate decline in tenants’ expected welfare.

“Policymakers may wish to take seriously the possibility that stronger tenant protections could generate costs for renters through rental market responses, which should be weighed against the benefits of those policies,” the researchers write. “This may be particularly true of interventions in the legal process of eviction, which generate costs to landlords and benefits to tenants that are not necessarily symmetric.”

Right to counsel had a modest effect in this analysis, raising monthly rents by an estimated $29 to $38 in the two years after full implementation in neighborhoods “treated” by the policy. Even so, its upward pressure on rents weakens its reputation as a prevention-style fix to homelessness.

The study’s conclusion that right to counsel, on net, diminishes tenant welfare is truly striking, as it would be hard to find a self-proclaimed tenant advocate in New York City who opposes the policy. But however counterintuitive the finding that right to counsel’s counterproductive may be, perhaps the results shouldn’t come as a complete surprise.

The chart below compares 50 states’ homelessness rates with their blueness, as measured by Kamala Harris’s share of the 2024 presidential vote. Every state with a homelessness rate above 400 per 100,000 people is a blue state. Not every blue state has a homelessness crisis. But every state with a homelessness crisis is blue. If we assume that housing policies tend to be pro-tenant in blue jurisdictions, the chart suggests that such policies may only have limited effect on reducing homelessness.

And though eviction, by definition, contributes to housing instability, its connection to homelessness is not straightforward. Eviction Lab lists on its website the “Top Evicting Large Cities in the United States.” They are mostly mid-sized southern cities. None has a reputation for out-of-control tent-city problems.

Collinson and his coauthors liken right to counsel to a form of insurance and present their analysis as a reminder that insurance isn’t free. Taxpayers pay for right to counsel—around $200 million annually, in the case of New York City—but so do other tenants, in the form of rent hikes. In much the same way, access to bankruptcy insures against financial risk and even arguably provides “implicit” health insurance to uninsured people, but it also raises the cost of credit.

This paper is unlikely to settle any of the many normative questions about eviction and housing policy. Anyone convinced that eviction is an act of violence and simply should never happen to anyone, anywhere, will likely remain convinced. The same is true of anyone who believes that a right to counsel should exist for all civil proceedings, or at least tenant-landlord court, similar to the case of criminal proceedings.

But perhaps some readers will adjust their priors. On the left, there’s always been a strand of thinking on homelessness that suspects that, if everyone would simply drop their preoccupations with addiction and mental illness and accept that homelessness is a housing problem, progressive solutions would at last enjoy the support they deserve. But while homelessness may well be, in some important respects, a housing problem, it does not follow that progressive housing policies are choiceworthy. In fact, they seem to make homelessness worse by distorting housing markets in ways that seem temporarily beneficial to some but prove broadly harmful to all over the longer term.